After their cold start in Japan, the Cubs get warm welcome in Arizona. Can they heat up?

PHOENIX — While his team’s TV network wants to sell you Pete Crow-Armstrong’s MVP candidacy and comps to one of the better North Side teams in recent memory, Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer is a tad more realistic after an eye-opening trip to Japan.

“The Dodgers can have some things go wrong,” Hoyer told me recently. “I feel like for us, we don’t have a lot of margin for error. We need guys to improve, we need to stay healthy, we need to play clean baseball.”

“No Margin for Error” isn’t the kind of marketing mantra the Cubs want out there, but Hoyer’s real talk is refreshing, especially early in the season. In the rarefied air of the National League, the major-market Cubs need to scrap their way back to relevancy. And as the ballplayers like to say, they have to do it one game at a time, while we big-picture thinkers constantly ask about the future.

Two years ago, the Cubs blew a seemingly sure shot at the playoffs down the stretch. Last year, they fell apart in May and June. This team can’t worry about what could go wrong later, but it does need to stack up some wins in March and April.

The Cubs got started on that front Thursday night with a 10-6 win over the Arizona Diamondbacks. If a team ever played a must-win game in its domestic opener, it was this Cubs team, which was coming off a rough two-game series against the Dodgers in Tokyo.

What a day in Chicago sports. The White Sox started it off with an 8-1 win over the Angels, putting them over .500 for the first time in literally years, and then the Bulls pulled off a miracle comeback over the Lakers. The Cubs topped off the day with this win. All we were missing was a really good Bears mock draft.

This was the Cubs’ second Opening Day and they’ve got two more to go. After this series, the Cubs help begin a weird new era of A’s baseball in Sacramento before returning home, finally, to open Wrigley Field for another year. That’s a lot of pregame pageantry for one team to take. How many times can you get introduced?

But no Cubs were complaining. Ask anyone who was there, it felt like a big game at Chase Field, not a late March yawner, with one of the biggest Opening Day crowds in Diamondbacks history. Having a huge contingent of Chicago fans here in spring break helped fill the park and charge the atmosphere. Chants of “Let’s Go Cubbies” filled the downtown stadium early as the visitors scored seven runs in the first five innings.

The bullpen, which sunk the Cubs early last season, made things interesting by giving up three runs in four innings, but new closer Ryan Pressly, who gave up one of those runs, got his first save of the season.

Pressly, 36, was one of Hoyer’s budget-conscious additions in the offseason, acquiring him in a trade with Houston. Though Hoyer wishes he had his Dodgers peer Andrew Friedman’s budget for top-line players, he praised the depth of his team before the game. Depth has been one of Hoyer’s consistent positive talking points as he navigates the negative questions about his roster, contract and the state of a franchise that doesn’t quite know if it’s a big-market powerhouse or a Midwestern flyover club.

Maybe it’s his way of showing his bosses he knows how to build a team on a tight budget. Hoyer, as we know, is at the end of a five-year contract that doesn’t yet have a playoff appearance to show for it.

“ I think we’re a deeper team,” Hoyer said in the visitors dugout to a small group of traveling reporters. “We’re better than the last couple of years, but the depth is what sticks out for me. I don’t know if we had that kind of depth before. I think we do.”

Hoyer was speaking about his roster and the minor leagues, but just in terms of Thursday’s lineup he was prescient, because eight of the nine hitters picked up a hit and his Nos. 1 and 9 hitters — Ian Happ and Miguel Amaya — drove in multiple runs. In those two losses in Tokyo, the Cubs scored just four runs on 11 hits. The defense also looked much sharper than it did in Japan.

The Cubs’ season-opening losses abroad didn’t do much to boost fan excitement in Chicago after a hot-and-cold offseason. If they landed Alex Bregman or were aggressive at adding more starting pitching, the vibes around the team would feel different. But the Cubs have a lower payroll than last season and are relying on four young players in their lineup. It’s what makes them such a question mark. Yes, they should win the NL Central, but is that their ceiling?

On Thursday, Michael Busch hit cleanup and the bottom third of the batting order was Crow-Armstrong, Matt Shaw and Amaya. Last week, I described having this many young players in the lineup as “volatility” to Hoyer, but he felt differently.

“I probably look at it as upside, not volatility,” he told me in our annual Q&A. “I think that when you talk about beating projections or over-performance, it usually comes with young players, guys entering those second and third years where they have a chance to take a big step forward.”

On Thursday, all four of those players picked up at least a hit, with Amaya driving in a whopping five on a pair of doubles. Crow-Armstrong and Shaw scored five of the Cubs’ 10 runs. On a night where shortstop Dansby Swanson went 0-for-5, their contributions weren’t just a bonus, they were absolutely necessary.

“I’m excited about our young players,” Cubs manager Craig Counsell said before the game. “I think our young players were a key to our second half of last season.”

If they can be a key to the first half of this season, I think the Cubs will indeed be a playoff team and another baseball season in Chicago will be a lot more interesting.

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